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Comment: Liam Fay: Planning snobs are strangling rural life

You can buy almost anything on a Dublin building site. Drugs, booze, sex toys, jewellery, you name it — all you have to do is find the right guy and place your order. Over the years, the capital’s larger construction sites have grown into sophisticated, self-contained civilisations, complete with their own laws, customs and internal black markets.

There’s a site on the southside where the on-campus merchants are so efficient that they’ve printed up catalogues from which their customers can reserve merchandise for delivery. Right now, the biggest seller among its workers is Viagra, the male impotency pill, which is being dispensed with reckless abandon.

Naturally, this is a facet of the building industry one never hears about, from either employers’ representative bodies or building worker unions. But then, a great deal of what is said publicly about the construction game bears little resemblance to reality as experienced by those who